Richard Skelton is based in the North of England where he works under the monikers of A Broken Consort, Riftmusic, Carousell, Clouwbeck and others.
Skelton has released twenty or so handmade CD-R artefacts on his own Suntain-Release imprint.
“From Which the River Rises” is his third release as Clouwbeck and consists of two long tracks, ‘Come the Aegir’ and ‘The Water’s Burden’ which are related with water and specifically with the Yarrow river and the natural elements of the land in the West Pennine Moors in Lancashire.
Skelton's music is deep, intense and delicate which exudes gorgeous soundscapes. The composition weaves ambient, electroacoustic, drones and neoclassical.www.sustain-release.co.uk and http://richardskelton.wordpress.com

Do you have a different musical approach with the aliases of A Broken Consort, Riftmusic or Carousell?

"Not at all. Or rather - I do have different methodologies - I experiment a lot with different ideas and techniques - but these approaches aren't codified or dictated by any musical alias. The first A Broken Consort recording, for instance, was improvised live, whereas the last one was the result of a slow accretion of recordings, written over many months."

You use different natural objects as wood or even barbed wire… Which is the criterion for choosing these or other objects?

"To varying degrees, all the music that I make is a transmutation of the landscape - most often it is the landscape that immediately surrounds me. Part of my process involves finding ways of making that transformation happen. Using natural ephemera as compositional devices is one way. On the most fundamental level, they can act as sonic objects themselves, or as plectra for playing musical instruments. On another level, they have a symbolic power - their acoustical contribution may be slight, or even non-existent, but their presence and resonance is felt in other ways.
The criterion for choosing them is therefore not necessarily their sound-making potential, but rather their power of representation. A birch leaf, for example, has a different significance than a beach or oak, although the sonic character of each may be indistinguishable. The only critical criterion in choosing such an object is that it must be given freely. I won't take anything that has to be uprooted, exhumed or otherwise forcibly removed."

Could you please tell us about a personal experience while you have been interacting with landscapes?

"One of the simplest, and most rewarding, things I've done is to find a place to sit and observe the natural landscape. To make as little noise and movement as possible. Many times on the moors I would crouch down in the ruins of an abandoned farmhouse and simply listen. These derelict buildings are often loci for birds and animals. Deserted by humans they become nest sites, hunting stoops and nocturnal shelters. Eventually, if I kept still and quiet, something would come. A stonechat. A kestrel. A fox."

How do you combine poetry and music?

"The texts and music I produce often come from the same place, both literally and metaphorically. They work independently of one another, and in different ways, but I think they also enrich each other. Regardless of its meaning, language is inherently musical, but I don't try anything as direct as combining a poetry recital and a musical performance in one recording. Whenever words and music are paired together, it seems to me, the music invariably becomes subordinate to the words. It becomes background.
I actually prefer not to make recordings of poetry, as any recitation will resolve many of the ambiguities of the text - it can only ever be a single interpretation. By simply offering the text, in conjunction with the music, the reader/listener is free to connect them together, or experience them separately."